I have now seen the copy for the early bound copies of The Adamantine Palace. Wow. Makes me want to go and read it all over again. Naturally I have proposed some changes (revenge, ha-haa), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many high-intensity words strung together anywhere else except… except in the blurb on the back of books…

In other news, copy-editing is due to finish in the second half of September, King of the Crags has recovered to about 45k words with about another 10k that can still be re-used from the first attempt (unfortunately all work on Order of the Scales, which amounted to about another 10k words will have to be permanently binned following the changes to The Adamantine Palace. Ho hum) and I’m still dithering about whether to attend Fantasycon this year.

And number one son’s obsession with Star Wars now means he’s learning to play the piano so he can play the Imperial March on the piano. He’s five, and when he grows up, he doesn’t want to be a train driver or a fireman, he wants to be a Jedi.

Well that’s it. Everything Simon has asked for, I have done (I think). I’ve been over all the changes and back again and TAP is better for it. And probably better for the changed ending (which is certainly going to make writing King of the Crags a bit easier).

All I have to do is press the send button and it’s done. I imagine this is what it will feel like when the first of my children finally leaves home. It’s a mixture of being really pleased and proud to see it go, and being desperately apprehensive that it’s going to get the shit kicked out of it and some running home again in floods of tears. It’s true that there’s still copy-editing and proof-editing to go, but this the point at which I feel like I’m saying: ‘This is it. This is the best I can do.’ Which I suppose I am. Eeep.

Next to all that, junking the c. 70000 words of King of the Crags I’d already done and starting all over again seems like trivia.

After a long chat with Simon (Spanton, editor for The Adamantine Palace), it has become clear that the ending had to change. Now I have to admit, the ending I wrote wasn’t the ending I was aiming for, nor the ending I was expecting. It has caused me some considerable difficulty in a couple of ways that I won’t go into right now for fear of dropping an immense spoiler. So maybe that’s why I didn’t put up much of a defence. The fact that the two other people to read the book both firmly thought I’d done the wrong thing, while I didn’t have much conviction either way had a lot to do with it too. The trouble is, how can I ever know who was right? Books don’t have multiple versions and ‘author’s cuts’ (in general).

That was yesterday. Today I wrote a new ending while I was suppose to be watching number one son play tennis. Now I just need to find the courage to let anyone have a look at it…